In WY we are making sure our county and city police are not making agreements with ICE to hold or share information about undocumneted immigrants. We are also partnering with faith based groups to provide refuge when needed for immigrants. We are also part of a group opposing an immigrant detention center in Wyoming.

What's happening in MI?

_________________It's only a matter of time before this thing blows up in our faces.

In WY we are making sure our county and city police are not making agreements with ICE to hold or share information about undocumneted immigrants. We are also partnering with faith based groups to provide refuge when needed for immigrants. We are also part of a group opposing an immigrant detention center in Wyoming.

What's happening in MI?

Great job roc

_________________I didn’t move, speak, or change my facial expression in any way during the awkward silence that followed.

Its going to be interesting here in Florida. The Republican reps in Miami Dade are getting grilled anytime they're in public by the press and others. Lots of questions to them about how they can continue to support a president who acts this way. Rubio is such a fuck. Oh well, party over country and constituents.

In WY we are making sure our county and city police are not making agreements with ICE to hold or share information about undocumneted immigrants. We are also partnering with faith based groups to provide refuge when needed for immigrants. We are also part of a group opposing an immigrant detention center in Wyoming.

What's happening in MI?

Travis of the Cosmos wrote:

Rocinante wrote:

Good to know Travis! Is anyone DOING anything about it?

In WY we are making sure our county and city police are not making agreements with ICE to hold or share information about undocumneted immigrants. We are also partnering with faith based groups to provide refuge when needed for immigrants. We are also part of a group opposing an immigrant detention center in Wyoming.

What's happening in MI?

Great job roc

Rocinante (in the Aziz thread) wrote:It's also funny that you think I think of myself as some enlightened hero. I don't really know what that's about.

I legit asked my dad at Thanksgiving if he had Citizenship. I wasn't sure, and I was starting to get worried. He said yes. I'm still not convinced. He has 2 birthdays in different years and no middle name.

WhiteBoyHatcher wrote:I legit asked my dad at Thanksgiving if he had Citizenship. I wasn't sure, and I was starting to get worried. He said yes. I'm still not convinced. He has 2 birthdays in different years and no middle name.

He probably just wants you to buy him cake twice

_________________I didn’t move, speak, or change my facial expression in any way during the awkward silence that followed.

I try to be objective and see the side of... well someone had X amount of years to get citizenship and didn’t. But the. I read a comment (so no clue if true) that the moment an illegal applies for citizenship, it alerts ICE and they get deported anyway. Is this true? And isn’t the path to citizenship difficult? If so, why? When that’s how this country was founded. I’m just trying to understand this better.

I try to be objective and see the side of... well someone had X amount of years to get citizenship and didn’t. But the. I read a comment (so no clue if true) that the moment an illegal applies for citizenship, it alerts ICE and they get deported anyway. Is this true? And isn’t the path to citizenship difficult? If so, why? When that’s how this country was founded. I’m just trying to understand this better.

This is from Jose Antonio Vargas I got it off Facebook. There's some links.

*UPDATED*

‘Why don’t you become legal?’ asked 79-year-old William Oglesby of Iowa City, Iowa. It was early December, a few weeks before the Iowa caucuses, and I was attending a Mitt Romney town hall at an animal-feed maker. Romney had just fielded questions from a group of voters, including Oglesby and his wife Sharon, both Republicans. Addressing immigration, Romney said, “For those who have come here illegally, they might have a transition time to allow them to set their affairs in order and then go back home and get in line with everybody else.”

“I haven’t become legal,” I told William, “because there’s no way for me to become legal, sir.”

Sharon jumped in. “You can’t get a green card?”

“No, ma’am,” I said. “There’s no process for me.” Of all the questions I’ve been asked in the past year, “Why don’t you become legal?” is probably the most exasperating. But it speaks to how unfamiliar most Americans are with how the immigration process works.

As Angela M. Kelley, an immigration advocate in Washington, told me, “If you think the American tax code is outdated and complicated, try understanding America’s immigration code.” The easiest way to become a U.S. citizen is to be born here—doesn’t matter who your parents are; you’re in. (The main exception is for children of foreign diplomatic officials.) If you were born outside the U.S. and want to come here, the golden ticket is the so-called green card, a document signifying that the U.S. government has granted you permanent-resident status, meaning you’re able to live and, more important, work here. Once you have a green card, you’re on your way to eventual citizenship—­in as little as three years if you marry a U.S. citizen—as long as you don’t break the law and you meet other requirements such as paying a fee and passing a civics test.

Obtaining a green card means navigating one of the two principal ways of getting permanent legal status in the U.S.: family or specialized work. To apply for a green card on the basis of family, you need to be a spouse, parent, child or sibling of a citizen. (Green-card holders can petition only for their spouses or unmarried children.) Then it’s time to get in line. For green-card seekers, the U.S. has a quota of about 25,000 green cards per country each year. That means Moldova (population: 3.5 million) gets the same number of green cards as Mexico (population: 112 million). The wait time depends on demand. If you’re in Mexico, India, the Philippines or another nation with many applicants, expect a wait of years or even decades. (Right now, for example, the U.S. is considering Filipino siblings who applied in January 1989.)

Taking the employment route to a green card means clearing a pretty high bar if you have an employer who’s willing to hire you. There are different levels of priority, with preference given to people with job skills considered crucial, such as specialized medical professionals, advanced-degree holders and executives of multinational companies. There’s no ­waiting list for those. If you don’t qualify for a green card, you may be able to secure one of the few kinds of temporary work visas—including the now famous H1-B visas that are common in Silicon Valley. For those already in the U.S. without documentation—those who have sneaked across a border or overstayed a temporary ­visa—it’s even more complicated. Options are extremely limited. One route is to marry a U.S. citizen, but it’s not as easy as the movies would have you think. The process can take years, especially if a sham marriage is suspected. I couldn’t marry my way into citizenship even if I wanted to. I’m gay. Same-sex marriage is not recognized by the federal government—explicitly so, ever since Congress passed the Defense of Marriage Act. From the government’s perspective, for me to pursue a path to legalization now, I would have to leave the U.S., return to the Philippines and hope to qualify via employment, since I don’t have any qualifying family members here. But because I have admitted to being in the U.S. illegally, I would be subject to a 10-year bar before any application would be considered.

The long-stalled Dream Act is the best hope for many young people. The original 2001 version would have created a path to legal status—effectively a green card—for undocumented people age 21 and under who had graduated from high school and resided in the U.S. for five years. As the bill stalled in Congress and Dreamers got older, the age requirement went up, getting as high as 35. Rubio is expected to introduce his own variation, granting nonimmigrant visas so Dreamers could legally stay in the U.S., go to school and work. Its prospects are dim in a gridlocked Congress. Obama, meanwhile, is said to be weighing an Executive Order that would halt deportation of Dream Act–eligible youth and provide them with work permits. Under both Rubio’s bill (details of which are not yet confirmed) and Obama’s Executive Order (which is being studied), Dreamers could become legal residents. However, both proposals are only the first steps of a longer journey to citizenship.

Since this article was published, there's been two important developments:

First, in June 2012, President Obama announced a "deferred action" program granting at least 1.5 million undocumented people under age 31 temporary relief from deportation and giving DREAM Act-eligible youth work permits. This is the most significant development in the fight for immigrant rights since the President Reagan signed the Immigration Reform and Control Act in 1986. So far, more than 400,000 undocumented youth--who don't have legal papers but grew up in the U.S. and consider America home--have been granted temporary relief.

However, I do not qualify. I was four months older than the age cut-off when it was announced.

Second, in June 2013, the Supreme Court struck down the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) as unconstitutional, granting relief to thousands of gay binational couples. DOMA only recognized marriage between a man and a woman, so the marriage of gay binational couples were not equal in the eyes of the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS).

My wife is trying to get her citizenship. She was trying to get it before they stop allowing her to request family members to come over, kind of like what is described above. She has a greencard. The processing fee is $700 or so. That was sent in about 6 months ago. She was called in to get fingerprints and other metrics. That is it. We haven't heard anything. We don't have a lawyer. If you get a lawyer, it probably costs about $5k or so. I know she's going to have to take a test soon. I probably could only answer about 75% of the questions. She was on a waiting list for 5 years. She got a call from an agency and they told her if she wanted to go, she needed to leave in 2 weeks. Imagine just living your life and then you get a call to drop everything to move to another country, you only have 2 weeks to get everything done. That's crazy to me. We're hoping she gets her citizenship before Trump does anything crazy.